In addition to celebrating the OpenStack Foundation’s birthday however, they also celebrated their own 6th birthday. To celebrate both occasions, they hosted a birthday party with 50 members of their group, stickers and a cake featuring both 6th birthday and official user group logos.

In this 9-minute Superuser TV segment, Kenneth Hui, a senior technical marketing manager at Rackspace, OpenStack Foundation ambassador and OpenStack New York and Philadelphia co-organizer describes growing in conjunction with OpenStack, the challenges faced throughout the years and what he hopes to see out of OpenStack in the future.

Hui, who has been involved with of the New York City User Group for the last three years, has seen “an upshot in the number of people who are taking a look at OpenStack” during his tenure. The people involved have changed, too. "There were a lot of vendors in the beginning," he says.
"As adoption grows, we’re seeing more users."

Those shifts tailor the group’s get-togethers. After noticing an increase in the last year or so of VMware administrators joining the New York User Group, Hui offered up a talk on the history of VMware’s involvement with OpenStack.

Hui also speaks to the commitment of the user group members – whether they are completely new to OpenStack or have been in the OpenStack community for a while – in learning more about OpenStack. They meet nine-10 times a year – blizzards permitting, a few storms have shut them down – and he says that’s frequent enough for people to feel a part of the community.

As the pace of technology accelerates, so does the work of the OpenStack community.

“There are so many new technologies that are coming down the pipe every few months instead of every few years,” he says. “The [OpenStack] community as a whole needs to figure out how to help us navigate through those new technologies…and [make OpenStack] an integration engine for these new technologies.”

Hui also coordinates the Philadelphia OpenStack User Group which will celebrate OpenStack’s 6th birthday on July 28 by making custom tees.

User Resources

OpenStack Superuser is a publication built to chronicle the work of superusers, and their many accomplishments personally, professionally, and organizationally. The emphasis is on a blend of original journalism and user-generated content, ranging from technical to business-level issues with feature stories, case studies, tips and videos for OpenStack cloud architects and administrators.